Modular power supplies and power conversion systems have been available for many years. In most domestic applications, commercial ac electrical power, e.g., 120v/208v/240v, may be fed to multiple rectifiers wired in parallel. The output of the rectifiers is generally a dc voltage, often 24v dc, that is fed to a dc output bus. The parallelism of the rectifiers permits the failure of one rectifier without causing a total system failure. Some applications for modular power supplies, e.g., a cellular telephone power system, may require a second (e.g., 48v dc) or even third voltage for other functions. However, these special applications are limited to a small fraction of the installations in the cellular telephone market. Several conventional approaches to satisfying this need have been made in order to present a single product that addresses applications that require converters, as well as those applications that do not.
In some cases, a shelf has been dedicated to converters. However, this is very expensive in terms of wasted structure and space, as the remainder of the shelf not used for converters is not useable for rectifiers and represents a non-useful sunk cost. Another approach has been to dedicate one or more bays on multipurpose shelves of the system chassis to converters. This approach rigidly defines a specific combination of rectifiers and converters and is inflexible in application. This approach works well only if the specific combination of rectifiers and converters exactly match the application. Of course, if system requirements grow or even change, this approach is not flexible enough to readily compensate for the additional system requirements.
In other cases, a chassis may have multipurpose shelves with bays configured for either rectifiers or converters by installing all wiring and connectors for both Rectifiers and converters at each bay. Again, the additional cost of dually configuring the bays is undesirable. In still another approach, an adapter is made available that is selectively installed in one or more bays of the chassis and is configured to accept one or more converters. In this case, the cost of the converter and adapter is only incurred when a converter is required for a specific application. This approach is especially useful when the secondary or tertiary power required is relatively low as compared to the primary power, which is usually the case in practical applications. However, this system typically requires dedicated wiring between the converters and the system overall controller.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a self-contained power converter module that includes control and distribution circuitry and can be quickly inserted into or removed from a modular power supply system without extensive configuration or a separate chassis.